Why we charge €9.99 instead of $99: a pricing teardown for lean SaaS

Pricing a B2B SaaS at €9.99/month sounds like a mistake. It usually is. Here's why we did it anyway, what we're betting on, and what would have to change for us to raise the price.

The market context

The bottom of the ATS market is ugly. Greenhouse starts at around $400/month for the smallest plan. Lever requires a sales call before you can see pricing — that alone tells you the floor. Workable is $199/month minimum. Ashby starts at $400. Recruitee is €269/month.

Below that there's a long tail of tools designed for HR generalists who hire 2-3 roles a year — they're often free or nearly free, but they're not really recruitment software. They're applicant inboxes with a kanban view bolted on.

There's a gap. Teams hiring 5-30 roles a year, often without a dedicated recruiter, who need real workflows but can't justify the enterprise price. That's our user.

The math we ran

We modeled three things:

• Cost to serve a customer. Supabase Pro is $25/mo fixed. Vercel is $20/mo. Anthropic API costs scale with usage but for typical hiring volume sit at €1-3/mo per active workspace. Resend is $20/mo for the first tier. So our floor is maybe €0.50 marginal cost per Medium subscriber once we're past 50 customers.
• Customer acquisition cost. We do not pay for ads. Our acquisition is SEO + LinkedIn outbound + word of mouth. CAC target: €0-20 per customer.
• Lifetime value. At €9.99/mo with assumed 18-month retention, LTV is ~€180. At €19.90 (Premium) it's ~€358. Healthy LTV/CAC even at the low price.

What we're explicitly betting on

Three bets:

1. Volume over margin. 1,000 Medium subscribers at €9.99 is €10k MRR — modest but real, with nearly all of it being gross margin. Achievable in 12-18 months if SEO and outbound work.
2. Self-serve onboarding. €9.99/mo doesn't pay for a sales rep, an onboarding call, or a customer success function. So the product has to onboard the user itself. Every confusing UI flow is a refund waiting to happen.
3. EU-first defensibility. US incumbents can drop their price, but they can't move their infrastructure to Ireland tomorrow. GDPR-native + EU-hosted gives us a durable edge in our target market even if the headline price levels out.

What it costs us

Low pricing is not free. It forces:

• No enterprise sales motion. A 5-call deal with a €30k contract is just not in the cards. We turn down those calls.
• No expensive integrations. A Workday connector would take 6 months and our customers don't have Workday. Easy no.
• No human-in-the-loop services. No managed sourcing, no ATS migration concierge, no "we'll set it up for you". All self-serve, all the time.
• Discipline on feature sprawl. Every new feature has to fit the lean operating model. We cut a lot of "nice-to-have" ideas because they'd compound support load.

When we'd raise the price

Three things would push us up:

1. Customer usage data showing churn at the price point is materially lower than at 2× the price — meaning we're under-charging.
2. A feature set that genuinely justifies enterprise-tier pricing (advanced analytics, multi-org structure, custom roles). We'd add a fourth tier rather than move the existing ones.
3. Compliance regimes (EU AI Act, DSA) starting to require ongoing investment that can't be amortised at €9.99/mo. Possible but not imminent.

Until then: low and honest. Cancel any time. No demo.